]I have set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth.
God said "I have set my bow in the cloud," indicating that it hadn't been there before. It was established as a symbol of the covenant God made.
You appear to ignore what comes AFTER your emphasis. The verse neither states nor implies that a rainbow had never occurred before. You appear to "prove" your point by simply restating it as fact! Can't you at least provide some kind of EVIDENCE for your position that rainbows were "new" to the earth?
Indeed, I'm amazed how often my brethren come up with these tradition-based assertions and then even suggest that the laws of physics somehow changed---all so that their extra-biblical tradition can be somehow made to make sense!
At "the last supper" Jesus establish the bread and the wine as symbols of "my flesh" and "my blood". Did bread and wine exist prior to having that symbolic significance? So why do you believe rainbows were any different?
For that matter, do you think circumcision had never existed as a custom before Abraham was told that it would be a covenantal sign? (I don't take a strong side either way on that one. Just curious.)
As to whether the rainbow being a minor side-issue, I was saying it was or wasn't. You had made the assertion that rainbows had never appeared prior to their having covenant significance and I merely observed that there was ZERO SCRIPTURAL SUPPORT for that position. And I even quoted the same passage you did to point out its absence. Yet, to make you point, you simply quoted the same passage and somehow "extracted" the imagined fact from the text. You'll have to do better than that! The fact that God "set his bow in the clouds" says NOTHING about whether the rainbow had existed before. (Some might even argue that the personal pronoun "his" implies that Noah was familiar with God's rainbow and this casual reference to it underscored that fact!) In fact, I would find your argument much more persuasive if God had said in the text: "Noah, what you are seeing in the sky is called a rainbow. From now on you will be seeing this in some rain conditions, before, during, and/or after precipitation. I created this new phenomenon as a sign of our covenant."
You appear to confuse a RESTATEMENT of your position as if such interpretations constitute EVIDENCE of your positions.
But in this case you are making the unbiblical claim that if Noah and his predecessors had sprayed water into the air in a fine mist on a sunny day, light would have failed to refract to create prismatic colors. To do so, you would have to make claims about the index of refraction which would render Noah and his predecessors effectively blind. After all, how could the lens of an eye operate where the physics of light defies the focusing of light?
I find that the creationist tendency to favor tradition over what the Bible actually says often leads them into destroying their own arguments. Just as you have done here.
] The fact is that it could not be more plain that this was a global flood that destroyed every land dwelling thing on the earth that breathed air.
If it is so "plain", why do so many scholars who read Hebrew point out that the Genesis text says nothing about a global flood?
And why do they also deny your claim that "every land dwelling thing on the PLANET earth that breathed air" was destroyed? As you surely know, everyone agrees that this statement applied to the ERETZ (the land) but not to the PLANET EARTH. [See, I can use the same rhetoric you use. "It could not say so more plainly!"] Indeed, if the Hebrew text had intended to refer to ALL lands of the planet earth, ERETZ would have been in the plural! But it was not!
(Yes, Strong's Concordance claims that ERETZ means "planet earth" in some contexts. Yet Strong's merely reflects the biases of the KJV---because it a KJV reference tool!---which virtually everywhere EXCEPT the early chapters of Genesis consistently translates ERETZ as "land", "country", "region", "wilderness" as well as "soil", "ground", etc. Isn't that interesting! Indeed, the KJV statistics are one of the best arguments for the fact that even those translators realized that ERETZ meant "land". That was their choice the vast majority of the time in the OT.)
I'm curious, when Genesis also says that people from every nation journeyed to Egypt to buy food during the famine, do you consistently and literally interpret that to mean that people from Japan, South Africa, Panama, and Hawaii trekked to buy grain from Joseph?
And when Peter preached his sermon on Pentecost to men from every nation who had come to Jerusalem, did his audience include Aztec Indians from America and Chinese Jews?
Or are you SELECTIVE about when you interpret words like "all" and "every"---and only take them literally when they reinforce your favorite traditions?
]
Remember what God said in Genesis 8:21.
And when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the intention of man's heart is evil from his youth. Neither will I ever again strike down every living creature as I have done.
Was God lying?
Why are you questioning whether God lied? God did NOT promise "to never again strike down every living creature". No, he promised to not do so "as I have done"! You have a habit of cutting God's statements short in order to make your case. And in doing so, you reveal your bias and your refusal to let the text speak for itself. God included the "as I have done" to make clear that (1) he was NOT saying that he would never again render judgment on a massive scale, (2) but he WAS saying that he would not repeat that particular kind of year long flood of Noah's ERETZ and thereby destroy all NEPHESH life within the ERETZ.
In fact, we already established that if God had wished to say that ALL LANDS were subject to the watery judgment, he could have used ERETZ in the plural, as the Biblical text does in other contexts when a much large geographic area was the intention!